We speak to David Ikard, professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University about the Black Lives Matter uprising in the US resulting from the murder of George Floyd by police. He discusses Trump’s tactics which he sees as deliberately flaring up the long-standing racial divisions in America, why he believes Joe Biden, although immensely flawed, is a better candidate than Trump, the need for policing as we understand it to end, what reforms he believes should be enacted, and more! We also speak to Nobel Prize winning biophysicist Michael Levitt about the coronavirus pandemic. He discusses why the focus on ‘R’ (reproduction number) by the British government is a ‘bad idea’ and offers an alternative measure, what many countries in the West got wrong which led to lockdowns being useless in countries such as Italy, the US and UK, his belief that social distancing was not properly practiced in major cities around the world such as New York, why he believes China’s Covid-19 statistics are accurate and not manipulated, which is a belief held by many Western countries, Sweden’s low death toll despite a relaxed lockdown and more!
